“Jude the Liminal: A Catastrophic Pursuit?” (original) (raw)
Related papers
Thomas Hardy’nin Jude The Obscure Eserinde Tek Boyutlu İnsan
Uludağ Üniversitesi Fen-Edebiyat Fakültesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, 2018
Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895) successfully represents the conflict between the individuals and the bourgeois industrial society in the late Victorian period. Herbert Marcuse’s criticism of the contemporary industrial society, which is actually a one dimensional society that imposes absolute norms on the individuals who are forced to become one dimensional wo/men, is quite relevant for a critical approach on this conflict. Marcuse’s approach enables a critical analysis of the social hegemony on such characters as Jude Fawley and Sue Bridehead in the novel. The institutionalised form of social oppression on the individuals aims to force these characters to lead one dimensional lives in accordance with dominant social norms. Hence, the protection of social harmony and the established bourgeois social order depends on the subjection of these individuals to the rules of the one dimensional society. So, this article argues that, viewed from Herbert Marcuse’s perspective, social o...
Contemporary Relevance in Hardys Jude the Obscure
ISSN 2278-9529 Galaxy: International Multidisciplinary Research Journal, 2013
The purpose of this paper is to concentrate on the contemporariness of Hardy’s novel, Jude the Obscure and how far it problematizes the elements of Victorian society that has relevance in connection to the context of modern society. The further focus is on Hardy’s effort to stand against the institutionalized notion of ‘Marriage’ and ‘Education’ where the female characters are portrayed as a text that reproduces the history of Victorian society. The paper also questions the strong feeling of Victorian compromise that forces Hardy to stay back. Hardy’s subversive nature is personified in the name of Jude, ultimately submits himself as a scapegoat to the Victorian social construct. Therefore, the paper is dealing with those hidden features that are yet to be explored in hardy.
Trope of Disillusionment in Thomas Hardy’s Jude The Obscure
Abstract Disillusionment is one of the major thematic thrusts of literary enterprise from the time immemorial. This foregrounds the fact that man’s disillusionment is ontological. The study investigates the trope of disillusionment in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. The paper reveals different struggles that Jude, the eponymous character, passes through. Through Hardy’s explicit portrayal of life in Victorian society, Hardy condemns human institutions which endlessly perpetuate people in suffering, castration of hopes and limit them sociopolitically. In spite of his legitimate and lofty dreams, Jude dies like a dog. Moreover, social factor responsible for the abortion of Jude’s ambitions and ruination of his destiny are emphasised in the study. The literary relevance of Hardy’s Jude the Obscure is not limited to the Victorian period which was the time when he wrote. This assertion is based on the fact that Hardy has fictionalised the struggle of the common man in the face of helplessness. Thus, the narrative has universal and timeless significance. Disillusioned protagonist is a recurrent figure in much of the twentieth century English fiction. The trope of disillusionment is an attempt to depict the hopelessness, confusion, frustration, alienation, disintegration and estrangement of modern man. Keywords: Disillusionment, Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure
Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure: the Women's Existential Vacuum
Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure: the Women's Existential Vacuum, 2020
The present paper deals with the Victorian realist writers' search for voicing the women's existential voice within a rigid society through subverting the romanticist literary style and themes. The chosen corpus of this study is Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure. The study, therefore, focuses on the female protagonist Sue Bridehead's suffering and journey towards creating a life that subverts the Victorian social norms. Introduction:
Orality in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure: Diachronic Approach
2015
The paper unveils some salient issues in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure in order to further illuminate the obscure nature of the web of meanings in the novel through recourse to psychoanalysis and the place of orality in the explication of the behaviour of Jude. The search for meaning may take the form of review of the text as well as the application of psychoanalysis in order to provide a scientific backing to the claims that are made therein. The unwritten historical scripts of the people of Wessex are also considered as instrumental in the semantic import of the text. The paper sums up the challenges that Jude faces to be borne out of the deep and dark level of the unconscious typifying the family lineage. It is, therefore, the inability of Jude to cross the boundary between his own ego and that of the family that is responsible for his inability to live a normal life and to this, the oral environment provides a clue.
Sexual Ideology and Narrative Form in 'Jude the Obscure
English, 1989
This paper attempts to explore the narrative structure Hardy employed in Jude the Obscure. Based on close reading and textual analysis of Jude the Obscure, the essay argues that the text takes on the form of circular structure and contrastive symmetry. With such pluralistic forms, a perfect harmony is thus achieved between the content, especially in the tragic themes, and form so as to enhance the tragic effect and irony of the text. It is concluded that both in time span and narrative structure Hardy transcends the 19 th century Victorian norms, thus Hardy may be also acknowledged as a modernist writer.
The Circus and the Deadly Child: Ruptures of Social Code in Jude the Obscure
Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure has frequently been read as Hardy›s social critique of marriage, class, and systemic education. Readings of the novel in this critical tradition have a tendency to simplify the text into an allegory emergent from Hardy's own biography. I seek to destabilize these readings by instead engaging with the text as one not concerned with institutions but rather the underlying social codes that give them coherence. By pairing Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of speech and counter speech with Lee Edelman's queer critique of child-centered futurity, I offer a new reading of the novel that privileges codes and legibility as central to the novel's critical project.
The writing of Thomas Hardy cannot be readily defined as an embodiment of the Realistic tradition. His too-liminal status as the last Victorian novelist, regional writer, and a collector of English rustics, has been vivaciously debated and contested (Miller, 1970; Widdowson, 1989; Moore, 1990; Morgan, 1992; Armstrong, 2000; Mallet, 2002; Nemesvari, 2011). This argument contributes to the debate on the relation between the real and the textual in Hardy’s last novel, Jude the Obscure (1895), which shows that Hardy’s language has features of a self-referential novel, close to the antimimetic poetics of postmodernist genres, which insists, however, on the connection with the real, where lies the inspiration for creativity and political intervention. Through the analysis of the allegorical figures of “intertexts” interwoven in the language of the novel, it will be argued that the representation of the novel registers the connection between Hardy’s visual imagination and his intention to intervene in a discursive field.
Intertextuality and mimesis in 'Jude the Obscure' by Thomas Hardy
2004
The aim of this thesis is to explore the role of quotation in Jude the Obscure. Quotation will be defined not only as literary quotation, allusion, or motto, but also as any structural citation (such as literary conventions or narrative paradigms) that represents both material and non-material references. I will analyse the poetical role of quotation in the novel's representation, observed as the work of intertextual relationships producing mimetic effects. This heterogeneous approach requires an investigation of the text's poetics through its external referents co-ordinated by the dominant discourses. Thus quotation will be investigated in two ways: stylistic, directed at the dialogue between the semantic fields in the text (Kristeva's vertical intertextuality), and textual, focused on the figurative meaning of the relationship of the text with other texts (Kristeva's horizontal intertextuality). The main objective is to understand the allegorical sense of reference...